Wifi hotspot powered by wind turbine and solar panel

Students at the Rochester Institute of technology have put together this WiFi hotspot that is powered by a wind turbine and a solar panel. It gets its signal through a parabolic antenna pointed at a near by building and repeats it for use in the vicinity. They are using a 30W solar panel, along with a 1/4 horse power 90V DC motor to charge two 6V batteries in series. On a windy day, the turbine has yielded 120W. Something interesting to note is a comment they made about blades. Though the ultimately decided to mimic a commercial design for wind turbines, they found the most efficient to be a single wood prop. Unfortunately, that prop was destroyed.

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19 thoughts on “Wifi hotspot powered by wind turbine and solar panel”

I lived in st. Louis Park, MN they had plans to put in a city wide solar powered wifi network… The contract was dissolved due to delays in deployment but solar powered wifi is nothing new… a bit of 802.11s would sure be welcome in that kinda node system though.

Too bad they are using only physical radio device on the node, as it will be connected to the parabolic dish and will also broadcast through this. The broadcom wireless chip used in the used access point cannot switch antenna output on a per packet basis (don’t know any that can, and even then it would probably be wrong for receiving packets). I would have used one of the many routers with two (real) wireless interfaces. Or get one with usb and plug in a cheap ralink wifi dongle that can work as an access point (the range sucks quite a bit, it’s often one model worldwide so out of the box it only tunes a few channels, and with like 5mW power. This can be overcome by modding the driver, or rewriting the eeprom for a permanent fix. Read your local regulations before doing tihs.)

I have some business ideas for this sort of thing, these sorts of concepts could go a long way for creating low cost intranets, WAN’s and extended neighbourhood networks, also allowing people to share internet connectivity costs. Imagine an entire neighbour hot spot’erised! Wherever you go, you’re connected. Set up a central email server, free IP calling within your suburb, completely removing the ISP from the equationn unless you want to connect to the WWW.

Not to take away from this effort but amateur radio operators have had solar powered FM telephony, and digital repeaters operating for some time now. I know, I know, off the shelf wifi allows more of the general public play.